Here’s what Mark Thoma has to say about where West is (via Andrew Sullivan):
The key, then, is to have good jobs waiting for workers when they aredisplaced due to inevitable (and desirable) technological change or tojobs moving overseas, jobs that are every bit as good or better thanthe jobs they left. That is where we are falling short. The new jobs weare creating are not as good as the jobs we are losing, when workersare forced to find new jobs they don’t tend to do as well as they didin their previous job, and that is the source some of the stagnation wehave seen in middle class incomes over the last few decades.
I invite any readers with a solid economics background to weigh in: How does the United States maintain its capacity to produce real wealth and, more importantly, to consume the goods now produced elsewhere in the world when the jobs it now depends on face such severe devaluation pressures? And won’t that tension grow as products imported from emerging economies eventually start rising in price, as globalization theory suggests they will? Does part of the globalized rebalancing include a transfer of poverty as well as a transfer of wealth?